I'll repeat Kevin Hardwick's recommendation of Pete Daniel's fine overview of the process of agricultural mechanization and labor usage. Under a slave regime, the same process would have rendered much of the rural workforce superfluous. I guess one counterfactual that we could ask would be if the greater resources of a southern plantocracy not burdened by a devastating war and the loss of their primary capital investment would have enabled a swifter trend toward technological innovation. Perhaps so, but I don't believe this would have meant the death knell of slavery. As others have pointed out, it was an adaptable institution, and slaves performed any number of technically sophisticated tasks.

But ultimately, I find this interesting question off point. Slavery drove a lot of the economic decisionmaking in the South, but its abolition was, and remains, fundamentally a political, not an economic question.

Bland Whitley
Papers of Thomas Jefferson

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From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Hardwick, Kevin - hardwikr [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2012 9:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] The Peculiar Institution's End Without The Intervention Of The Civil War

Lyle--

My apologies--I thought the issue on which I posted was sufficiently important as to merit the comment, but you are quite right that it was off topic.  So in the spirit of making amends, I will try to address your actual question, if only modestly.

I am hardly an expert on the post-Civil War agricultural South--so do take the following with an appropriate grain of salt.  Many years ago now (yikes!), when I was in graduate school, I had the pleasure to read a fine book by Pete Daniel, a curator and agricultural historian at the Smithsonian.  His book is titled BREAKING THE LAND:  THE TRANSFORMATION OF COTTON, TOBACCO, AND RICE CULTURES SINCE 1880 (University of Illinois Press, 1986).  It contains what I recollect to be a terrific discussion of the timing of the mechanization of agriculture in the the South--in comparison, if I recall correctly anyway, with agricultural mechanization in California.  I am sure there has been more recent work than this book, and I am sure that there are others here on this list who know this subject much better than I do.  But if all else fails, Daniel's book might be a good place to start.

I am a bit leary of making counter-factual arguments.  But it does strike me that the place to begin is by looking at the actual timing of the transition to capital intensive, mechanized agriculture in the South.  And barring a better suggestion, Daniel is perhaps as good a place as any to go for that.

All best wishes,
Kevin
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Kevin R. Hardwick
Associate Professor
Department of History, MSC 8001
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807
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